TCH-Andy

The short answer is yes, you will need to change it to "php" or "?" If you are using windows try downloading 12 ghost search & replace from http://www.supergee.com/ghosts/replace.htm it's shareware and will enable you to search and replace through all your files. Andy

Google hit the bulk of my site over the last couple of days to, so maybe it's waking up again I don't know enough about google to know if this is a "fresh" or a "deep" trawl through the site though. Andy

unfortunately only for those in the US Obviously don't want us Brits getting any free stuff Andy

Yes, you should be able to do that. I would use the ftp to copy your exsisting forum files onto your hard diak first as a backup though - that way you have the data to (1) update the modifications you have already made into the new forum and (2) put back on the server if everything goes wrong Andy

Thanks, now I'll be able to answer the full 100% next time Andy

Yes, you should be able to transfer most of the settings without to much trouble.

Having a quick play with Cpanel I agree, it doesn't seem possible from there to install the forum into your root directory. The methods I see at the moment are; (1) install manually into your root directory. (2) redirect and accccept that the link in serch engines will be "www.mysite.com/forums/index.php" - I'll let our SEO guru tell us if there are any drawbacks with that , although I can't think of any. (3) create a front page introduction, which you will be able to optimise for search engines much more easily and better, which then links into your forums directory. (4) create a subdomain "forum.****" which will in reality be your main domain!!! If being high in a search engine is important to you, I would personally tend to go for (3) because I would expect you to be able to get a much higher ranking in a search engine that way. Andy

You could always install the forum directly yourself, although there must be a better way. I'll have a quick look.... Andy

I'm not certain what your aim is here, but yes, if the meta tags and everything are set up correctly in "mysite.com/forums/index.php" and you submit it to the search engines then they will be acceptable. Why are you wanting to redirect? Does your site only have a forum on it? and hence you want all visitors to go straight there? I think doing it this way the search engines will find it happily and index it, but when you look on the search engine it will appear as "www.mysite.com/forums/index.php" You could set up a subdomain as "forums.mysite.com" and then the index would be found automatically... Andy

Be nice if it was the latter I'm 99% certain it will be the former though - $10.95 per year or, if you prefer, $109.5 for 10 years. Andy

will permanently redirect from index.php in your root directoy to the forums index file. you need to incoude the http://www.mysite.com/ in the second part - which should of course be changed to your domain Andy

Yes, .dwt is a dreamweaver template file, so you should really creat a new page from the template file in dreamweaver, that will create a html page that you can use. The .dwt file has a few extra bits in it, but it should still work. I would change the extension to htm though Andy

I picked up the windows help file version of the manual from http://www.php.net/download-docs.php which I've found invaluable as a reference source and includes the tutorials. Andy

Hi Wesley, Welcome to the family Andy

On the join page it seems to be 1 file for me http://www.nchaloclan.com/flash/join.swf On a seperate note, A notice that you are offering free email addresses on your account for other people. I'm not sure where this fits with the AUP, and it may well be fine, but if I was you I would check it out with HG. Andy

On your home page, the problem might be with the 4 files http://www.nchaloclan.com/flash/homeflash.swf http://www.nchaloclan.com/flash/homeflashb.swf http://www.nchaloclan.com/flash/homeflashc.swf http://www.nchaloclan.com/flash/homeflashd.swf which didn't seem to load on my machine, and it just waits for... Andy

I tried on a dial-up line and gave up, sorry. Just didn't want to wait that long. Andy

Jack, Many thanks for the explanantion, I understand what you mean about the difference, and fortunately I plan all my pages to be without the dynamic '&' '?' or '='. So everything should be fine Thanks again Andy

I will Thanks Andy

Scott, Many thanks, yes, it is a new site, and that gives me some good pointers for improving things . TCH Rocks Andy

There are still a number if things I want to do to tidy up the code, but for anybody who wants it, please feel free. You will need to set up a sql database (which you can do through Cpanel) and define the 4 fields. The values at the top which you can set mean that if (in this case) if 6 hits in a row are all within 2 seconds of the previous hit (ie. 6 hits within 12 seconds if you like) then the user will just get a junk message until there are no hits for a 120s period. Then just include it at the start of every page with I provide no promises with this code, but it seems to work for me I will be updating it, and if anyone would like an updated version (or if you have ideas as to how to improve it) please email or PM me. Andy

A pleasure - we've all been there and made that mistake the www and the public_html directories should be the same though, because they both point at exactly the same space Andy

Thanks Scott. What about search engines like inktomi that don't crawl dynamic sites by default This seems to indicate that a completely dynamic site would not be fully crawled. I guess just having a main index page in static html would provide enough pointers to get the rest linked. On the other hand Google seems to be by far the most important, and that does do dynamic sites. What is the problem with setting php to interpret all your .htm files? it would increase the server load slightly, but not really if you were converting them all to php anyway. I'll take the 301 redirect route, but I'm just curious Thanks again, Andy

That's the plan - just the same junk file forever I'll do a couple of mods, then let you have a copy of the script if you like. I've been nobbled by Adobe Acrobat once myself Andy

I've had a good play with PHP now, and seen the many advantages that it gives me - thanks for all those who have provided support, ideas etc. I'd now like to upgrade my site from straight HTML to PHP. How do I do this without losing my position with the search engines? One way seems to be to set the .htaccess file to say that all files ending in .htm are really php files. That way I wouldn't be changing any file names, the existing ones would work until I upgraded them... but is there a drawback doing it this way? A second way would be to place a permanent redirect for each of the html files as I change them in my .htaccess file. Is there and alternative, or better method? or should I use one of the above? All ideas / suggestions welcome. Andy